Facebook’s Groups for Schools Geared for College Students

Facebook is doing it again. One of its latest features? Teaming up with colleges and universities through its new Groups for Schools. Basically, it’s a platform exclusively for faculty and students with .edu email addresses. Are you an online student? This application might make your student life a whole lot more interesting.

The hope? Students will come together in subgroups under their university’s main group page and engage with one another through a heightened atmosphere of campus community. Whether it’s talking about school clubs or assignments, students will be able to communicate and even share files with a maximum size of 25 MB.

The file sharing is designed to make it easier for text files to be passed back and forth between students in an effort to encourage collaboration. Whether its class notes or flyers for campus related events, the file sharing is supposed to encourage activity related to varied educational activities.

While some people may question whether Facebook’s Groups for Schools can compete with paid university platforms like Inigral or Blackboard, according to Mashable, Groups for Schools is a legit competitor. It seems natural that Facebook would come out with a new platform geared for college users since it originally was only available to college students before expanding to users of all ages and backgrounds.

The Groups feature on Facebook has grown since its inception and Facebook said in a statement, ‘they weren’t always strong collaboration tools.’ Within the last two years, Groups has changed and become a more focused tool for interaction. With the new interface, students began using the platform more and more.

For now, Facebook is keeping its sights set on helping higher education engage through the avenue of social media. At some point in the future, however, it might move beyond the current limitation of college campuses.